A care home worker and a patient with young onset Alzheimer’s form a bond – then Covid strikes. What a harrowing and important film this is … until the third act
Help, a one-off drama starring Jodie Comer and Stephen Graham and written by Jack Thorne, is set in a care home in 2020. Which is to say, in essence, a plague house. Even if not all the stratospherically high expectations roused by such a holy trinity of talent are quite met, it still provides in the first two thirds of its 90-minute run one of the most evocative and harrowing depictions of recent history we have yet seen.
Comer plays a 20-year-old newly qualified carer, Sarah, who starts a job looking after residents in a Liverpudlian care home and finds she is unexpectedly good at the feeding, changing, cajoling, cheering and calming that makes up the average day. Tony (Graham) has young onset Alzheimer’s and a tendency to roam if not gently monitored. He is one of the more able residents and they form a friendship alongside her duty of care, fostered by games of Shithead over which they trade stories of their respective misspent youths. There are lovely, funny, poignant scenes as they talk, laugh then suddenly have to negotiate the blanks in Tony’s memory and ride the mood swings his relentlessly advancing condition causes.
